Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

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Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 28, 2016 3:27 am

So this is a thread that I meant to start some time ago, but I meant to start it with a focus on the idea of Universal Basic Income. However Czar asked me a question which led me to realize that that's the wrong focus. I support the idea of a universal basic income, and though I don't think it's economically feasible yet, I believe it will eventually be necessary. And my reason for believing that stems from my beliefs about the future of the economy.

So this seems like a better point to discuss, as well as whether a UBI will eventually provide a solution.

I look at the economy and I see statistics with job growth mostly in low-paid, part-time, service jobs, and stagnant wage growth for most workers. I look at myself, unemployed for most of the period since college and even now being subsidized by my mother. I look at my mother, and see how she makes a decent income but works well over forty hours a week. And I look at my father, my brother, and the kind of job that I'm trying to get after grad school: starting salaries that are at least in the high five figures, great benefits, and jobs that involve working forty hours and going home.

My father and brother have jobs in the emerging Quaternary Sector of the economy. Historically, when the Secondary Sector (manufacturing) replaced the Primary Sector (farming) and currently with the Tertiary Sector (services) replacing the Secondary Sector, the new sector has long hours and shit wages. The Secondary Sector ultimately ended up with reasonable hours and good wages, but I don't think that we will see the same thing with the Tertiary Sector. The reason is the aforementioned Quaternary Sector.

The goal of the Quaternary Sector is to increase productivity. Increased productivity means fewer people can do the same low-skilled work. Now if everybody could just switch to the Quaternary Sector, there would be no problem; we'd see a shift to the Quaternary sector and enjoy the benefits of ever-increasing productivity. But I'm not convinced that everybody is capable of becoming part of the Quaternary sector. Based on my experience with undergrads in the University (the best and the brightest in the state, mind you) I'm convinced that some people just don't have the right mental framework to solve even relatively simple problems, much less come up with creative solutions to complex ones.

So the Quaternary sector is going to continue to decrease the demand not just for "low-skilled" labor, but for most labor that doesn't involve creative and on-the-spot thinking, even for "skilled" jobs. We're already seeing this in computer science, where creative work continues to pay well, but an influx of people with some programming skill has depressed the wages of "mere" programmers.

Now, to my mind, the ideal solution would be to reduce the number of hours people work in tandem with the rise of productivity. But that is not going to happen, because even if the average person doesn't see a benefit to the rise in productivity, the investing classes do. Not only are they not going to pay two people the wages of one to work twenty hours a week; they don't like to pay two people the wages of two, and increasingly try to find people who can do the work of two people on the wages of one. (My mother had this experience at her old company, I did at my job in Turkey, and I know several TCSers have dealt with that long term.) This is for somewhat skilled jobs. In unskilled jobs--where benefits are one of the most expensive things about full-time employees--they hire three people to do the job of two part time and with no benefits.

Meanwhile, companies are getting pickier about who they employ. I was employed for 14 months out of the five years after I graduated. I looked up employment statistics for adults with autism, and something like 75% were neither in work nor college three years after graduation. Most adults with autism I know have either never worked, or worked only part-time service jobs briefly before getting fired because autism and customer service are not a good mix. Avi is the only adult with autism I know who has done well in this regard, and he sensibly decided to join the Quaternary Sector, where problem-solving skills are vital and social skills are almost superflous. That is now what I'm trying to do too.

But other people, with problems like ADHD, schizophrenia, or just plain old depression and anxiety, are also finding it increasingly difficult to hold down a job and don't have the Quaternary sector as a possibility. I certainly know of several people on TCS in this category. As demand for labor goes down and companies get pickier, I imagine that the pool of unemployed will only increase.

The unemployed end up subsidized either by family, the government, or both. So too do a lot of people working part-time service jobs on wages inadequate to support themselves independently. I imagine that the cost of subsidizing both unemployed and underemployed will only go up, as productivity increases and labor (other than certain in-demand specializations) becomes increasingly cheap.

So this brings me to the idea of the Universal Basic Income. I remember being shocked the first time I heard it, because I heard it from a Libertarian, and it seems at first glance like the most un-Libertarian thing in the world. However it actually makes sense from a Libertarian perspective: you do away with the bureaucracy which provides social services and just give everyone a lump sum. Assuming that the cost of subsidizing the unemployed and underemployed increases, this will look increasingly attractive.

And yet I still imagine it will be a hard sell. Not for practical reasons (though I don't think it's practical now, I believe it eventually will be), but for moral reasons. It involves A. giving everybody money and B. saying nobody has to work. While many countries have equivalents of the Earned Income Credit, you have to work to get it, the amount of money you actually get is quite small (I got three hundred dollars last year as a result of the EIC), and it applies only to people who aren't making much money.

So I guess the questions I have for y'all are:

  1. How realistic is my view of the future economy?
  2. Will a UBI be economically viable in the future?
  3. Would it be possible to sell it, assuming a slow decline of employment figures and wages rather than a sudden crisis?
  4. What do you think of the idea?
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Wed Sep 28, 2016 2:58 pm

I agree with the concept of a Universal Basic Income.

Obviously we have a large number of people in our society struggling to make ends meet. Our middle class is shrinking rapidly, and I think that even though the country is touting some positive figures with regards to the number of jobs added, they may not be paying well enough to support a substantial quality of life for the people who take them.

Add the additional punch of outrageous costs of living (housing, utilities, food) in many areas of the country, and the idea of having a UBI would be a no-brainer.

When it comes to talking about who foots the bill for UBI, then that's when the shitshow would most likely start.

Hike taxes up? I imagine we'd be looking at a substantial tax increase across the board for everyone, even those who would benefit most from a UBI.

Put the burden on corporations? Watch those corporations then turn thousands of full-time jobs into tens of thousands of part-time jobs, thereby weaseling their way out of providing benefits. Their argument might be "Well, now that you're getting this extra money from the government courtesy of us, you can buy your own benefits." Or, watch them ship operations and jobs overseas to other countries, putting more pain on the citizens again.

Curb government spending? Not likely.

And as for what would be an acceptable amount for every person to get, how would that be determined? What is helpful to a person living in Gettysburg might not even make a dent in the financial woes of a person living in San Francisco or NYC (cost of housing, etc.)

So, as mentioned before, I like the concept, but how we would get there is an entirely different story.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 28, 2016 4:08 pm

The libertarian program generally proposes cutting all social programs and entitlements and using it for a universal basic income for everyone, resulting in no net increase. However this results in a rather small income that--while enough for one healthy person to live on in some parts of the country--is likely inadequate for most people. The libertarian proposal still assumes that most people will be able to get jobs going forward.

Plus Medicare and Medicaid cover things insurance often won't. Push patients on those programs onto the private market and watch premiums go way up. My preference would be to wait until eliminating non-medical social programs and entitlements reach the point they could pay for a UBI, hence why I say I think it's currently viable.

Companies are shifting to part-time, no-benefits jobs anyways. A UBI adequate to live on would address this by taking out of the labor market people who wouldn't work at the jobs they offer for the wages they pay if they didn't need to eat. The side effects of increasing corporate taxes I'd worry about more are that it will drive even more corporations overseas and will drive consumer prices up.

As for varying cost of living, that's an interesting question. On one hand, if the government gives you enough to live on in Nebraska, but you live in San Francisco and can't find a job, you can move to Nebraska. On the other hand, most people won't relocate to cheaper places, either because they can't (family ties) or because they won't. And there's a high upfront cost to moving.

My preference would be to base it on the average cost of living, but cheaper and more expensive areas scale up and down by some fraction of the cost of living (start at half and tweak it as needed). I would also offer relocation allowances for people moving to cheaper areas, bot not the reverse. That would give some incentive for people to move to less-desirable areas, while still hopefully allowing people to live in New York or the Bay Area if they make deep cuts elsewhere.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby sunglasses » Wed Sep 28, 2016 5:10 pm

Isn't Denmark doing this? (I'm sorry, I get all the Scandanavian countries mixed up. Please no one shank me. )
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 28, 2016 5:20 pm

sunglasses wrote:Isn't Denmark doing this? (I'm sorry, I get all the Scandanavian countries mixed up. Please no one shank me. )

No country does this yet, though some oil-rich countries give all their citizens annual royalty checks.

Switzerland held a referendum on the idea last year, but it was poorly-designed and easily defeated.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Sep 28, 2016 10:09 pm

cmsellers wrote:My preference would be to wait until eliminating non-medical social programs and entitlements reach the point they could pay for a UBI, hence why I say I think it's currently viable.

Non-medical social programs don't constitute nearly enough spending to provide a decent UBI. The portion of the federal budget dedicated to non-medical social programs is dominated by social security, which currently only provides a low basic income to a small portion of the population. You'd have to increase government spending substantially, even eliminating all other non-medical social programs, to provide any kind of reasonable universal basic income.

Which isn't to say that that would necessarily be a bad idea, but it's unclear to me why we'd jump straight to a radical solution. There are plenty of data demonstrating the success of more targeted anti-poverty programs, and of social welfare programs that currently exist. So presently, I don't see any reason to go for a basic income guarantee.

That said, I can conceive of ways in which it might work. There are many instances in which putting restrictions on anti-poverty programs reduces their effectiveness; people generally know on what they need to spend money, and restricting the scope of transfer programs too heavily can make them more inefficient by frequently only transferring money to people for things for which they don't need money. A basic income guarantee certainly doesn't have that problem, and so it may be worth investigating on a smaller scale. But until that's done, and until there are data demonstrating that a universal basic income would be cost effective and substantially reduce poverty, I don't see a reason to prefer it to an expansion of existing welfare programs.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 28, 2016 10:35 pm

aviel wrote:
cmsellers wrote:My preference would be to wait until eliminating non-medical social programs and entitlements reach the point they could pay for a UBI, hence why I say I think it's currently viable.


I am very clearly aware of that, avi.

My point is that I think that the number of people who will be on disability, food stamps, or other government assistance is going to continue to increase, as companies become increasingly picky. While a large part of the cost of providing for these people will fall to their family members, the government will see an increasingly large tab. And as people live longer, people taking Social Security for half their adult life will also become increasingly common, and I don't foresee raising the retirement age more than a few years being politically feasible.

My belief in the case for a UBI is predicated on several assumptions about the economy, which I described in my opening post.

  1. Automation will make an increasing number of jobs obsolete.
  2. Many of the jobs that remain will require skills that a many (most?) people simply cannot acquire.
  3. Increased competition for a dwindling number of low-skilled jobs will drive down wages and benefits for those jobs further with more and more people working jobs that can't actually support them.
  4. Increased competition will drive more and more people out of the workforce entirely through retirement, disability, and/or dependence on family members.
I do not believe that a UBI is necessary now. And while it may be feasible, it's such a risky thing to attempt that I wouldn't want to attempt it yet.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby Marcuse » Wed Sep 28, 2016 11:34 pm

Automation will make an increasing number of jobs obsolete.


I'm actually pretty wary of this assumption, because Marx was saying exactly the same thing a hundred years ago, and I don't know what's fundamentally different about today compared to then that makes that a necessary conclusion. It seems like a Utopian concept that automation will make work obsolete and we'll have to just pay people for existing.

Many of the jobs that remain will require skills that a many (most?) people simply cannot acquire.


Why? Are we talking skills in terms of highly technical positions that require specific training?

Increased competition for a dwindling number of low-skilled jobs will drive down wages and benefits for those jobs further with more and more people working jobs that can't actually support them.


You know what else supports people working jobs they can't live on? The government handing them extra money. Increasing that amount of free money from the government wouldn't make this situation any better, and would probably collapse low skilled work in the US and demand countries export those jobs to cheaper countries even harder than they already do.

Increased competition will drive more and more people out of the workforce entirely through retirement, disability, and/or dependence on family members.


Assuming they don't re-skill, and don't seek a new field. Also, retirement is becoming a thing of the past as well. We're seeing consistent problems with pension funds and their inability to pay out the sums they're promising to current pensioners, thereby obligating current payees to increase their contributions to compensate. Pension liabilities are outstripping the income they're receiving.

This really does cut to the heart of the problem we'd see with a dwindling workforce being imposed upon by government in order to pay for a UBI. There simply wouldn't be enough taxes to go around, and if the UBI was enough to cover the average cost of living, there would be a huge incentive against working at all, both due to it being functionally unnecessary as well as any earned income being taxed to the point where it's not really worth it to go through the hassle of training into a profession.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby cmsellers » Thu Sep 29, 2016 12:19 am

Marcuse wrote:I'm actually pretty wary of this assumption, because Marx was saying exactly the same thing a hundred years ago, and I don't know what's fundamentally different about today compared to then that makes that a necessary conclusion. It seems like a Utopian concept that automation with make work obsolete and we'll have to just pay people for existing.

Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete. It's just that new jobs have cropped up to take their place. Marx saw automation make most agriculture jobs obsolete and a shift of low-skilled workers to manufacturing. This led to an increase in the average standard of living as stuff became cheaper to produce. Now technology is increasingly making manufacturing jobs obsolete, and people are shifting to service jobs, making services cheaper. But automation (and sometimes making customers do the work themselves, as with self-checkouts) is making many service jobs obsolete too.

But what replaces service jobs? It seems to be the job of researching and designing new products and of automating ever more things. And that is something that I don't believe many people can do.

Marcuse wrote:
Many of the jobs that remain will require skills that a many (most?) people simply cannot acquire.


Why? Are we talking skills in terms of highly technical positions that require specific training?

No, we're talking jobs that require the ability to think a certain way. I remember as an undergrad watching classmates struggle to translate formal rules into trees, and assuming it was because they just didn't like linguistics. But as a graduate student I realize that the students who struggle with this sort of thing are never CS majors (CS majors are better at syntax than linguistics majors); they're people who major in things like anthropology and advertising. I think about all the stories about applicants for programming jobs who can't write a bizz-buzz program in any language. And I think about how when I described my undergraduate thesis some people understood it interestingly without understanding linguistics, and other people (like my mother, who is very smart mind you) could not understand what I was doing at all.

All of this is anecdotal, but it makes me suspect that there are some kinds of people who are incapable of certain kinds of thinking. If people are not capable of seeing the relationship between rules in written (rules) vs diagram (tree) form, it makes me wonder how such people would be capable of the sort of work the Quaternary sector requires.

Marcuse wrote:You know what else supports people working jobs they can't live on? The government handing them extra money. Increasing that amount of free money from the government wouldn't make this situation any better, and would probably collapse low skilled work in the US and demand countries export those jobs to cheaper countries even harder than they already do.


Marcuse wrote:Also, retirement is becoming a thing of the past as well. We're seeing consistent problems with pension funds and their inability to pay out the sums they're promising to current pensioners, thereby obligating current payees to increase their contributions to compensate. Pension liabilities are outstripping the income they're receiving.

Well yes, because they're funded by payroll taxes and were created on the assumption that both wages and the number of people contributing them would continue to rise, when most of the growth in the economy has accrued to executives (also part of the Quaternary Sector) and investors.

Marcuse wrote:This really does cut to the heart of the problem we'd see with a dwindling workforce being imposed upon by government in order to pay for a UBI. There simply wouldn't be enough taxes to go around, and if the UBI was enough to cover the average cost of living, there would be a huge incentive against working at all, both due to it being functionally unnecessary as well as any earned income being taxed to the point where it's not really worth it to go through the hassle of training into a profession.

Sorry Marc, I'm not sure I follow. It seems like in your first post you're that people would want to work even at low skilled jobs to get extra money, and on the other hand that nobody would want to work if they didn't have to.

I'm assuming that most people would want to work at something they enjoy, but most people don't want to work at unskilled jobs. People who can find jobs in the Quaternary Sector will have work they enjoy and be handsomely compensated, as they are now. People who cannot will have the choice between seeking a job in one of the other sectors or living off their government-provided income.

Since there is no need to work with a UBI, I would expect wages to settle at a rate that enough people can be found to operate those sectors. It may be that people will work for $.25/hr if all they need to work for is spending money, but that won't matter if people don't need those jobs merely to live. With a UBI, we could do away with the minimum wage, which I imagine is another reason libertarian types tend to like the idea.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby PSTN » Thu Sep 29, 2016 12:24 am

So, I searched "what would happen if we killed all the poor", and one of the results was Forbes.com. Not any particular article, just the Forbes home page. I don't know what that implies.

Anyway, as per usual, I've devised the perfect solution: a fixed economy. I don't mean a planned economy, I mean a completely fixed one. We create a series of laws setting the prices for everything from a pack of matches to a fully loaded aircraft carrier, and once those laws are in place, nothing can change those prices. Similarly, we set in stone the wages for every conceivable occupation, from panhandler to multi-national conglomerate CEO. Third, we assign a specific occupation to every citizen within the nation, some will be billionaires, some will be destitute hobos, but we'll make sure to have a healthy middle class in there somewhere.

Boom. Problem solved.

Geeze, for all the yammering I hear every day about it, you'd think economics was hard or something. Where would you lowly fools be without me?
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby cmsellers » Thu Sep 29, 2016 12:29 am

PSTN wrote: "what would happen if we killed all the poor"

<... >

Boom. Problem solved.

*awards PSTN the Nobel Prize in Economics. *
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby Crimson847 » Thu Sep 29, 2016 12:32 am

Marcuse, what happens when we develop AI that can match or outperform the human brain? What work could humans do that a sufficiently advanced AI couldn't?

cmsellers wrote:My father and brother have jobs in the emerging Quaternary Sector of the economy. Historically, when the Secondary Sector (manufacturing) replaced the Primary Sector (farming) and currently with the Tertiary Sector (services) replacing the Secondary Sector, the new sector has long hours and shit wages. The Secondary Sector ultimately ended up with reasonable hours and good wages, but I don't think that we will see the same thing with the Tertiary Sector. The reason is the aforementioned Quaternary Sector.

The goal of the Quaternary Sector is to increase productivity. Increased productivity means fewer people can do the same low-skilled work. Now if everybody could just switch to the Quaternary Sector, there would be no problem


I don't see an explanation for why the service sector's pay and working conditions won't increase. That seems like a questionable assumption over the short to medium term, given the increased demand for services and reduced supply of service workers due to aging of the population.

cmsellers wrote:The goal of the Quaternary Sector is to increase productivity. Increased productivity means fewer people can do the same low-skilled work. Now if everybody could just switch to the Quaternary Sector, there would be no problem; we'd see a shift to the Quaternary sector and enjoy the benefits of ever-increasing productivity. But I'm not convinced that everybody is capable of becoming part of the Quaternary sector. Based on my experience with undergrads in the University (the best and the brightest in the state, mind you) I'm convinced that some people just don't have the right mental framework to solve even relatively simple problems, much less come up with creative solutions to complex ones.


Are you talking about people with mental disabilities? Because disability benefits are already a thing.

But other people, with problems like ADHD, schizophrenia, or just plain old depression and anxiety, are also finding it increasingly difficult to hold down a job and don't have the Quaternary sector as a possibility. I certainly know of several people on TCS in this category. As demand for labor goes down and companies get pickier, I imagine that the pool of unemployed will only increase.


All the conditions you mention are treatable, particularly the mood disorders, and the quality of said treatments is advancing at a rate that's actually rather exciting. If you think these conditions doom a person to poor functioning or disqualify them from pursuing a career in "brain work", you're mistaken. If this is what you were referring to in the above paragraph when you said some people lack the capacity to solve even simple problems, I struggle to find polite words to express my opinion of that.
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby PSTN » Thu Sep 29, 2016 12:41 am

cmsellers wrote:
PSTN wrote: "what would happen if we killed all the poor"

<... >

Boom. Problem solved.

*awards PSTN the Nobel Prize in Economics. *


Economics is fun!


Crimson847 wrote:Marcuse, what happens when we develop AI that can match or outperform the human brain? What work could humans do that a sufficiently advanced AI couldn't?


I think at that point we've got bigger problems than the economy. Like why would super-humanly intelligent machines take their orders from lowly humans?
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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby Learned Nand » Thu Sep 29, 2016 12:44 am

PSTN wrote:So, I searched "what would happen if we killed all the poor"

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Re: Universal Basic Income and the Future of the Economy

Postby Crimson847 » Thu Sep 29, 2016 1:02 am

PSTN wrote:I think at that point we've got bigger problems than the economy. Like why would super-humanly intelligent machines take their orders from lowly humans?


You'll be happy to know that some really smart people are pondering that question, and possibly less happy to know that they can't agree on an answer.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificia ... ion-1.html
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